ATHABASCA - If you’ve ever been a part of 4-H you know it’s more than horses or cattle, it’s a little bit of everything, and anything you want it to be.
And while the name of the club might be Thunderin’ Hooves, members take part in projects like archery, poultry, photography, and canine projects all while learning the tenets of being a good 4-H member and they got to show it all off at Skills Day May 10 at the Athabasca Ag grounds.
“They don't realize we have so much to offer here,” said mom Brandy Strong. “A lot of the clubs are strictly for beef and something else, but we do a lot of different things.”
Ten-year-old Aubree English is in her first year and jumped in with both feet doing projects in carcass steer, market hog, and archery.
“I wanted to make new friends and just see what it was really like to be in 4-H,” she said. “I just kind of wanted to try something new.”
The market hog project is exactly like it sounds, getting a hog ready for market and English uses a 50-50 mix of barley and wheat twice a day to get them there but for the carcass steer project, the goal is to get the meat to AAA quality which can only be assessed once the steer is butchered.
“We're going to Sangudo (Custom Meat Packers), and they actually have somebody there that'll grade them and tell you if they’ve actually been properly fed or overfed,” explained Strong. “You don’t want them too fatty; you don’t want them too lean. You might think your animal looks great and you get it there and they might be like, ‘Well, it was too overfed' or, ‘It wasn't fed enough.’”
Maria Kingston, 14, wanted to expand her knowledge of dog agility with Daisy and to meet new people.
“I have a rescue that we bought a couple of years ago. She's a Pomeranian-poodle-Shih Tzu,” said Kingston. “I had already been doing agility with her for about a year. She can already do some jumps and stuff, but I just felt like I wanted to do more than that.”
Also in her first year, she’s making plans to come back.
“Next year I think I'm gonna try and do more than just canine, like maybe chickens.”
Peanut, an eight-year-old Corgi-Australian shepherd cross, attends 4-H with owner Arianna Smith, nine.
“I thought it would be fun,” she said of why she joined.
She would also be interested in doing more next year, like maybe a feline project, archery, or something a bit more toothsome.
“I love snakes, I have one.”
